Cyan Software Manages Virtual, Physical Network Resources

Cyan is adding a new application for its software-defined networking platform designed to help service providers more quickly spin out services from both their physical and virtual networks.

Company officials on June 17 unveiled Planet Orchestrate, software for its Blue Planet carrier-grade SDN platform that brings together wide-area network (WAN) automation and management and SDN orchestration capabilities to create an environment that enables carriers to reduce the time and costs associated with creating services to deliver to their customers.

The software currently is in trials and proof-of-concept efforts, and its features will become generally available in the second half of the year, according to Cyan officials.

Planet Orchestrate comes at a time when service providers are under increasing pressure to quickly and cost-effectively bring services to market, and to automate these virtualized services between data centers, across the WAN and atop legacy infrastructures, according to Cyan officials. The key for doing all this is orchestration technology that helps pull together virtual and physical resources that can be automated and configured across multiple network domains, they said.

"Planet Orchestrate combines the capabilities of a WAN service automation and network management system with an SDN controller and orchestrator to enable network operators to deliver new services, on both physical and virtual infrastructure, more quickly and at a lower cost," Cyan President Michael Hatfield said in a statement.

Planet Orchestrate comes with several features, including multi-domain service orchestration for delivering services across multiple domains. It supports a range of SDN controllers—including Cyan's own Blue Planet and the vendor-driven OpenDaylight technologies—and management platforms (such as cloud managers and network managers) through a single interface. It will be available in the third quarter.

Network-functions virtualization (NFV) orchestration, which offers a platform that IT professionals can leverage to manage a range of networking applications, also will be available in the third quarter, while cloud orchestration capabilities that support data center service offerings like infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that can be coordinated across a WAN will be available in the fourth quarter.